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rcmann, you're focusing on the school-yard bully, what about the corporate bully who is your superior. With a word, a bad performance review, or a whispered complaint, they can ruin your career, cost you your job, eliminate your income and cause you to be thrown out onto the streets.
Believe me, these people exist and revel in the power they have. How do you stare them down when you don't have the resources or 'power' to confront them, buy a gun?
The idea I have is not about the 'noble' warrior virtues, it would be about the abuse of power and opportunism. An exploration of the darker side of power. Simply because I can, I do. And that's addictive.
What would you do if you walked into a room full of psychopaths, all armed with guns? Personally, I'd run. But the antagonist, what would he do?
quote:Originally posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury: I'm so sorry, pdblake, especially because I can imagine so many "if only" thoughts that such information about your daughter could generate.
Best wishes on your writing in the new year.
Hindsight will haunt me forever. Thanks for your thoughts and wishes Kathleen. I'm already formulating something for a new novel, the one I was in the middle of just isn't doing it for me at the moment. I think I need something different to focus on.
Sorry for going so off topic Grumpy Old Man, I'll leave you all to it now. I'll be back after the holidays hopefully.
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quote:Originally posted by Grumpy old guy: rcmann, you're focusing on the school-yard bully, what about the corporate bully who is your superior. With a word, a bad performance review, or a whispered complaint, they can ruin your career, cost you your job, eliminate your income and cause you to be thrown out onto the streets.
Believe me, these people exist and revel in the power they have. How do you stare them down when you don't have the resources or 'power' to confront them, buy a gun?
The idea I have is not about the 'noble' warrior virtues, it would be about the abuse of power and opportunism. An exploration of the darker side of power. Simply because I can, I do. And that's addictive.
What would you do if you walked into a room full of psychopaths, all armed with guns? Personally, I'd run. But the antagonist, what would he do?
Phil.
I am familiar with that type of bully. I have worked with some. I have worked under some, too. In the southeastern US, there is a tendency for elected officials to sometimes adopt a similar attitude as well. Although, in the SE and especially in Appalachia, the elected officials who adopt that attitude frequently end up disappearing.
In the corporate world, you wind up playing politics. Backstabbing. "Cloak and dagger" rather than open confrontation. If worst comes to worse, you quit and find another job. I once move up to department head after my bos, the current department head, came to work with one to many drinks under his belt and punched the president. A week later I understood exactly why he had done that and started looking for a new job myself.
The type of open conflict based society you describe might make an interesting story, but I am afraid I could not force myself to believe that it would be made viable -even viable in the short term. It would tear itself apart.
In a functional society, the kind of behavior you describe inevitably leads to self-destruction. I don't care how wealthy you are, nobody lives in a vacuum. Sooner or later, and usually sooner, people will start avoiding a bully like that, and word gets around. A domineering boss whose department loses people all the time, and whose department's productivity drops like a rock, is going to attract unpleasant attention from his own supervisors. Unless he owns the company, in which case he will soon be out of business and it becomes a moot point.
The scenario you describe reminds me of the "Mirror Universe" concept in Star Trek. Everyone in that universe is presented as evil, vicious, selfish, and moral without redeeming value. But people like that could never have cooperated long enough to build an interstellar empire, much less held one together.
In sociology, there are in-groups and out-groups. You are loyal to your in-group and hate your out-groups. That's a ludicrous over simplification, but it gets the idea across. If every individual is hostile to everyone, and nobody has an in-group to hold their loyalty, then you don't have a society. You have a prison population where the inmates have *not yet* had time to organize themselves into proper gangs. Even convicted sociopaths will band together and exhibit a form of loyalty to their own in-group. It's a simple matter of human instinct and a pure survival necessity.
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